China

The dynamics between the central administration in imperial Chinese dynasties and local levels of administration since the first unification under the short lived Qin in 220 BCE and the ways in which the shadow of these persist to this day is an enormous subject. It is curious, as Jae Ho Chung points out in the preamble to this short but intense and highly rewarding monograph, why so little attention has been paid to this subject.

Chinese Internet companies are uniquely innovative but are perceived by outsiders as mere copycats: Baidu is the “Chinese Google”, Alibaba is the “Chinese Amazon”. Yet this simple picture does not capture the reality of how Chinese internet companies have become intrinsic people’s lives. To call WeChat a messaging service, as if it is merely a WhatsApp knockoff, is to misunderstand it. WeChat is WhatsApp plus Facebook plus Instagram plus Paypal plus Apple Pay plus Wattpad plus Uber plus Visa plus Fidelity Investments.

But there may be another reason for these companies’ success other than circumstance: simply, they are Chinese.

One might be forgiven for thinking “Oh no, not another book on modern China… What could anyone possibly have left to say about it?” But Alexandre Trudeau does not simply write about what he observes, but, like all good travel-writers, shows us what effect the journey had on him. And he does so without thrusting himself into the foreground; there is no large talking head loudly proclaiming “look at me” in the foreground and with tiny buildings in the background incidentally pointing to a foreign location.

For a book targeted at children, Division to Unification in Imperial China has a ponderous title. Parents and teachers might wish to cover this over with masking tape so that young readers instead concentrate on the handsome black, white and ochre illustration that otherwise adorns the cover.

Manila was not the best place to be on New Year’s Eve 1941. US General Douglas MacArthur had withdrawn to Corregidor and had declared Manila an “open city”, not that the Japanese forces—literally at the city gates and expected to enter the next morning—were paying much attention to that.

But Melville Jacoby, a journalist for TIME and LIFE, was still there holed up in the Bay View Hotel, together with Annalee, his wife of a few weeks, and thirty other reporters.

Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West is a collection of academic articles edited by Ben Hillman and Gray Tuttle. Although ethnically and historically quite dissimilar, the two regions of Xinjiang and Tibet occupy a similar space in China’s political landscape. Both are large volatile regions on the country’s western borders with large non-Han populations—many of whom continue to bristle at their integration into the People’s Republic of China.

Those with an academic interest in Chinese literature are undoubtedly aware of the CT Hsia classic History of Modern Chinese Fiction which has just been reissued by the Chinese University Press. Those who aren’t might find the thought of a 600-page tome of literary criticism to be more than a little daunting; that would be a pity, for the volume is an example of erudition and clarity of expression.